24 Hour Signs: Producing Promotional Products – Pronto!

Providing products promptly is built into 24 Hour Signs’ DNA.

“The name of the company says it all,” notes Owner Jeff Parker. He launched 24 Hour Signs as a franchise operation in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in 2022. Designed to be a one-stop shop for design, signage, and branding needs, 24 Hour Signs provides signs, marketing and consulting, design and branding, decorated apparel, and promotional products.

We talked with Jeff about the importance of his promotional products business, how his shop is equipped to handle rush orders, and what it takes to succeed with promotional products.

Stocking blanks of popular items and manufacturing some promotional products in-house help 24 Hour Signs maintain its market advantage. | Credit: 24 Hours Signs

How is your business set up?

We are a franchise operation with a turnkey setup. This store has six team members. Our sales manager meets with clients and brings in the business. Our designers handle all the graphic design work for clients who want signs and apparel. Two production managers and two assistants are responsible for all the production including apparel, signage, and promotional products.

In this day and age, keeping business local is top of mind for most of our customers and other businesses we deal with daily. We say, "Skip the middleman," and get it done locally in our shop. To that end, we offer a wide range of products and services designed to make our store a “one-stop” shop for our clients.

Please describe your promotional products business.

We offer promotional products as a standalone service and on a rush basis, which helps us attract new customers. We also provide them as a service to our existing customers, as well as a cross-sell with other projects. Many clients come to us for complete branding packages. In recent months, for example, we printed thousands of election signs and were able to cross-sell buttons, stickers, and thousands of printed lighters.

Roughly what percentage of your business does promotional products represent?

We produce over a million dollars in sales annually, and promotional products make up almost 10% of our overall sales. Our average order for promotional products is just over $300. Offering this product category is a huge benefit for our company.

What types of promotional products do you offer?

We focus a lot on rush orders of promotional products. To make sure we can deliver on time, we stock a lot of blanks like lanyards, pop sockets, koozies, lighters, openers, spinners, mugs, tumblers and so much more. We also fabricate and customize keychains, buttons, pins, badges, coasters, and other items using our laser cutter and UV flatbed printer. Some of our most popular promotional products are coasters, PVC cards, pop sockets, glasses, UV DTF stickers, lighters, and magnets.

24 Hour Signs specializes in timely production of promotional products for its clients. | Credit: 24 Hours Signs

This is a competitive industry – how do you maintain your market advantage in promotional products?

For one thing, we always stay informed about the newest developments in printing equipment. The ability to deliver quality print on a wide variety of substrates has been invaluable, and we want to remain on the leading edge of that technology. We also continue to look for new items to offer our customers, and we keep an eye out for popular items our product partners offer.

To amplify our reach, we are also currently building our e-commerce site. The site will include all of our in-house, fabricated, and third-party promotional products, and should make it easier and faster for our clients to place their orders.

What equipment do you rely on to manufacture and customize promotional products?

Our Roland DG VersaUV wide-format flatbed UV printer is our most-used machine for promotional products and is one of our biggest money-makers. It allows us to print large numbers of promotional products in full color very quickly to meet our customers’ needs.

We run a gamut of UV inks that provide a lot of flexibility, including the ability to add texture and simulated embossing to our promotional product printing, as well as a gloss coat. We use CMYK, gloss, white, orange, and red inks. This mix allows us to print on glassware, coasters, ID cards, golf balls, miniature hockey sticks and pucks, drinkware, and many other promotional products. We have used our UV printer to print on so many items, it is tough to recall them all.

We also use our UV printer in combination with our 60" x 36" laser cutter to manufacture some of our own promotional products, which helps keep our costs down. We cut all kinds of shapes and sizes in acrylic, HIP, Lamacoid, foam board, PVC, metal, glass, and wood, and then direct print on them.

We now offer direct-to-film (DTF) UV to our wholesale customers and use DTF UV for larger items like YETI coolers and luggage. We also use DTF and laser engraving to decorate products.

Have you had any challenging promotional products orders lately?

Absolutely! We print on a lot of water bottles, and on those few occasions when the client wants a custom-printed graphic or logo that’s wider than one inch, we will line up the water bottles to print a one-inch swath, then turn the bottle one inch and print an additional one-inch swath beside it to create a larger graphic. We’re aware that Roland DG now offers a Rotary Rack attachment that makes UV printing on cylindrical objects much easier, and that may be a purchase we consider in the future.